June 2026 in the Apiary: A Busy Month Behind the Scenes
June is one of those months where it feels as though everything happens at once.
The colonies are strong, the bees are making the most of the changing summer forage, swarm season is still keeping us busy and the jobs never seem to get any shorter. While the first spring honey was safely in jars, there was still plenty happening both out in the apiaries and behind the scenes.
Summer Nucs Head to Their New Homes
One of the highlights of June was seeing this year's summer nucleus colonies head off to their new owners.
By the time a nuc is ready to leave us, we've already spent weeks helping it develop into a healthy, balanced colony. There's much more to it than simply putting a few frames of bees into a box. Every queen has been introduced and checked, brood patterns monitored, food stores built up and the colony given time to establish properly before it's ready to move on.
Some were collected here in North Shropshire, while others travelled across the country by Royal Mail.
One of the nicest parts of raising nucs is hearing how they're getting on once they've arrived. Whether it's someone's very first colony or an experienced beekeeper expanding their apiary, it's always great to receive messages saying the bees have settled in well.
Helping new beekeepers get started is something we genuinely enjoy, and it's rewarding to know these colonies are now beginning the next stage of their journey.
Building Our Honey Room
Away from the bees, June was a big month for another reason too.
After plenty of planning, our dedicated honey room is now functionally complete.
As we've grown, we'd reached the point where having a space designed specifically for extracting, filtering and jarring honey made sense. We wanted somewhere that wasn't just clean and practical, but also efficient to work in during the busiest weeks of the season.
With our food hygiene inspection from Shropshire Council coming up in July, we spent a lot of time thinking through every detail.
Where should equipment be stored? What's the best route for honey to move through the room? How can we make cleaning quick and straightforward between batches? We even found ourselves thinking about little things that make extracting easier after a long day in the apiary.
They're not the sort of things most people think about when they pick up a jar of honey, but they're all part of producing food to a high standard.
Like most projects, it took a little longer than we'd planned, but seeing it finally come together has been incredibly satisfying. We're looking forward to putting it properly to work over the coming weeks as this year's Blossom Honey starts coming in.
A Little Rain Was No Bad Thing
After such an exceptionally warm and dry spring, the start of June brought something we'd actually been hoping for: a bit of rain.
It might sound strange, but beekeepers don't always wish for endless sunshine.
Warm weather is great for flying, but the bees need flowers producing nectar, and flowers need moisture. After several dry weeks, those spells of rain gave the countryside a chance to freshen up before the warmer weather returned.
As the month went on, temperatures climbed quickly and we experienced one of the hottest spells of the year.
The bees made the most of the good flying weather, but they also had another important job. On really hot days, thousands of workers spend time collecting water rather than nectar. Back at the hive, they'll spread tiny droplets around the brood nest while other bees fan their wings to create airflow, helping keep the colony at exactly the right temperature for developing brood.
It's a remarkable system, and one that's easy to miss if you're only watching bees coming and going from the entrance.
A Snapshot of a Working Landscape
June also saw the launch of something we'd been looking forward to for quite some time: our first batch of Appleby's Spring Honey.
Produced by our bees at Hawkstone Abbey Farm, it's a honey that reflects far more than just a single flowering crop.
Appleby's regenerative approach to farming encourages a rich variety of flowering plants through carefully managed herbal leys, diverse pastures and field margins. The bees don't know they're flying on a dairy farm, of course. They simply visit whichever flowers are producing the best nectar that day. But because the landscape is managed with biodiversity in mind, the mix of forage available to them is quite different from some of our other apiaries.
In many ways, each jar is a snapshot of that landscape at that particular moment in time.
It's one of the reasons we're so keen to keep every apiary's honey separate rather than blending it together. Whether it's Myddle, Lyneal or Appleby's, every harvest tells the story of the place it came from.
The Bees Move on to Summer
Although the spring honey was already in jars, the bees had quietly moved on.
By June, the spring blossom had largely finished and the summer forage was taking over. Bramble, clover and lime trees were becoming increasingly important nectar sources, with the first sweet chestnut flowers beginning to appear towards the end of the month. Every warm, dry day gave the colonies another opportunity to bring nectar home, and the honey supers continued filling steadily.
One of the things I enjoy most about keeping bees is how they change the way you look at the countryside.
A patch of white clover in a field, a line of lime trees through a village or a bramble hedge along a country lane suddenly becomes much more interesting when you know thousands of bees are visiting it every day.
It's also what makes each honey harvest different. As the flowers change through the season, so do the flavour, colour and texture of the honey.
While our Spring Honey captured the early part of the year, the bees were now quietly building what will become this year's Blossom Honey.
Swarm Season Continues
June also meant plenty of swarm management.
Even colonies that looked perfectly settled one week could be making preparations to swarm by the next, so regular inspections remained a big part of the month.
Providing enough space, checking for queen cells and keeping a close eye on how each colony was developing helped us stay one step ahead where possible.
No two colonies ever behave exactly the same, which is one of the reasons beekeeping never gets boring. Every inspection tells you something new.
What Surprised Me This Month
Probably how satisfying it was to finish the honey room.
Most of my time is spent thinking about the bees, but having a dedicated space that's been designed specifically for extracting and jarring honey feels like an important step forward for the business.
It's one of those jobs that customers won't necessarily notice, but it'll make a real difference to how we work for years to come.
Looking Ahead to July
As June came to an end, it felt as though everything was ready for the next stage of the season.
The colonies were healthy, the honey room was ready for its first full season, and the bees were making good use of the rich variety of summer flowers around our apiaries.
July should bring the next big milestone of the year as we begin extracting this season's Blossom Honey. Exactly what that harvest looks like will depend on the weather over the coming weeks, but the signs are encouraging.
For now, it's simply good to stand in the apiary on a warm summer evening, listen to the steady hum of thousands of bees returning home, and know that they're getting on with what they do best.